


The Joy Will Burn Out

by sinuous_curve



Series: A Concept By Which You Measure [1]
Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Community: kink_bingo, D/s, M/M, Painplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-31
Updated: 2012-10-31
Packaged: 2017-11-17 10:07:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/550416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinuous_curve/pseuds/sinuous_curve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Twelve hours later, Clint’s looking at Bruce with a very careful, neutral expression. </i>
</p><p>
  <i>“What?” Bruce asks, short and low and growled. </i>
</p><p>
  <i>Clint shrugs. “Your eyes are green.”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Joy Will Burn Out

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd. Audienced by locketofyourhair.

Hulking out is a little like drinking. It feels goddamn amazing while he’s doing it, and then the morning after it’s like being hit by a truck. 

Their latest encounter was with Ross, which Bruce has trouble understanding in any logical sense, since SHIELD should be all the protection between himself and the army Bruce should need. And yet, fanaticism is the seed of invention, and it was Ross and his forces the Avengers grappled with. Most of the time these days letting the Hulk out is a matter of Bruce letting go, but. It was the Hulk breaking past his will when he saw Ross, and the raw rage that flooded through him. 

Twelve hours later, Clint’s looking at Bruce with a very careful, neutral expression. 

“What?” Bruce asks, short and low and growled. 

Clint shrugs. “Your eyes are green.”

The change in mass that comes with hulking out expends an irrational amount of energy, more than the human body should be capable of containing at any one time. Bruce _feels_ like someone took a meat hammer to his muscles, like they broke his bones into shards and inexpertly knit them back together, like they flayed his skin open and laid out his nerves. He’s feels pasted together, and hungry, and still _angry_. Angry at Ross and SHIELD and the army and his own goddamn ineptitude that let him to this place. 

He opens his mouth with something hard and bitter on his tongue. And Clint looks at him, quirking an eyebrow up. There’s a nice purple bruise on his cheek, and he’s wearing long sleeves to avoid the inevitable unspoken questions about whether or not it really is a good idea to have two normative humans in the field. 

Bruce snaps his jaw shut. “I’m going to the gym,” he says and pushes away from the table. 

“Wait,” Clint says to his back, but Bruce is already halfway down the hall. He hears Clint’s chair scrape across the floor, and his footsteps, but he is not at all prepared for the sudden shove of Clint’s body weight, grabbing Bruce by his shoulders and shoving him against the wall hard enough to jar his bones and send a full body spasm of hurt roiling over his nerves. 

Bruce gasps, hands coming up automatically to curl around Clint’s wrists hard enough to feel the small bones grind together. 

“What?” Bruce grits out. 

“I get,” Clint says in short, bitten off words. “That you are hurting. And I get that Ross gets to you. And I _get_ that your reaction to being hurt is to hurt yourself worse.” 

Clint really, really doesn’t get enough credit for being observational, despite constantly acting as their defacto lookout. Bruce shudders against the words and the monster in his chest and veins and goddamn cells beating against his skin with the need to get out. It would hurt, Bruce knows. It would be agony to hulk out again so soon. 

“And?” he says. “So? Therefore?” 

Clint’s stronger than he looks. Bruce strains against him, and realizes it wouldn’t be all that easy to throw him off. His joints feel like there are pieces of glass shoved inside them. (The last time he saw a SHIELD doctor, after an explosion that knocked the hulk out, he was told that the constant stress of hulking out was wreaking havoc on his cartilage. At the time it had seemed like the most utterly, irrationally bizarre unexpected side effect of becoming a rage monster.) 

“Let me help,” Clint says. His voice is even, deeply controlled. He sounds like the assassin he was. “I know,” he growls. “How to fucking hurt people, Bruce.”

Bruce jerks his shoulders and for a moment they grapple, until Clint does something that jars Bruce’s knee enough to make the growl in his throat peter out into a groan. The wave of pain that follows is. Is a relief. An anchor. 

“I don’t need--”

“Fuck you, you don’t,” Clint cuts him off. “Just. Fucking stop putting that gun in your mouth again and again and let me _help_.”

Bruce is thrumming with too many things. He doesn’t like not being the mild scientist that everyone sees, glasses sliding down his nose and sleeves rolled up to keep from getting pencil smudges and chemicals on them. He doesn’t like how feral he feels the morning after, like a rabid animal run through with pain that makes them lash out and bite and claw. 

He isn’t good at reckless, except how he’s had to learn to be. 

“Clint,” he says. And nods.

Clint leans in and kisses him hard and biting. Before the accident, it would have left a bruise.


End file.
